Is your dealmaking process as efficient as it can be?
Affinity Analytics is the Affinity CRM’s interactive reporting tool. It is available to all Affinity Scale, Advanced, and Enterprise customers and legacy Premium customers.
By providing easy-to-understand visualizations of complex data, Affinity Analytics enables investment professionals to easily surface real-time insights, drill into ongoing trends, and optimize dealmaking activities.
For example, interactive reports on your team’s pipeline enable you to closely monitor your deal flow while ensuring you continue to nurture your most valued relationships.
This guide highlights some of the many ways venture capital firms are using Affinity Analytics to make their dealmaking processes more efficient—and more successful.
Assess the quality of your deal opportunities
The Affinity relationship intelligence CRM enables you to quantify the number of high-quality opportunities your team pursues based on criteria you establish—like the milestone they reach in your deal flow—and then map them across a specified time period.
You can use this data to establish benchmarks based on historical trends and deal sourcing efficiency scores that represent the percentage of total opportunities pursued that you won.
For example, in the below chart, the number of total deals closely tracks the number of high-priority deals over a year, except during October, which shows an increase in total deals but a relatively consistent number of high-priority deals.
Establish meaningful KPIs informed by real-time data about your deal sources, prospects, and pipeline.
Determine your most valuable deal sources
Where are your best deals coming from? One way to measure ROI is by tracking your deal sourcing categories. The data visualized below shows that in June, July, and August, leads from Portfolio companies drove the pipeline.
Affinity Analytics also provides Introductions Summary Reporting, which automatically identifies and tracks introductions your firm makes to external contacts so you can better understand where deals are coming from—as well as quantify the value of your firm’s network to current and prospective Limited Partners and Founders.
Understand the nuances of your team’s activities with analytics about their prospecting, dealmaking activities, and relationship management—by source, sector, and other factors.
Improve ROI
Once you’ve identified your most fruitful deal sources, you can compare deal source against deal quality to determine which channels to further invest in and which to deprioritize. In the below chart, more prospects came from cold emails than from LinkedIn, despite more leads originating from LinkedIn.
Measure the efficiency of your team’s deal sourcing efforts by surfacing trends in your dealmaking workflow that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Close deals faster
How long does it take to move a deal from awareness to first meeting? Or from meeting to close? While your team’s dealmaking efforts impact the strength of your pipeline, they also impact a Founder’s experience of your firm: a drawn-out process might diminish the Founder’s appetite to do business with you.
In the below chart, decisions about deals in the Network Effects sector are taking the longest to move from due diligence to term sheet, while Pre-Seed investments are slower to move forward from the start. The Industrial Tech industry pipeline moves more smoothly across each deal milestone than the other sectors.
Monitor your deal flow with familiar, easy-to-understand visualizations about your deal pipeline and the time spent in each stage of the deal lifecycle.
Keep your team up to date
Affinity Analytics helps you identify deficits in your pipeline that are slowing down your dealmaking. You can set up automated reports for your team based on deal status—how long a deal has been stalling, for example—encouraging them to follow up with the prospect and set up another meeting.
In the below chart, a report has been created for deals in the Introduction stage for 10 or more days, reminding team members to reach out to their contacts.
Stay in touch with your highest-impact connections and keep track of your most valuable deals.
These are just some of the many ways venture capitalists and other investment professionals use the Affinity CRM, and Affinity Analytics, to make more efficient use of their team’s resources, keep track of their business network, and source and pursue more valuable deals. Affinity can help your firm do the same.
Contact a customer success manager at info@affinity.co to:
- Learn how to customize Affinity Analytics to best support your analytics requirements
- Upgrade from Affinity Essentials (or legacy Premium) to get access to Affinity Analytics
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